By Kim Harmon

It’s that time of the year when the World Wide Web is on the verge of collapsing under the weight of all those shoppers looking for just the right kind of fruitcake to send to their nephew in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin . . . when finding a parking spot at the mall is harder than finding someone who won’t cut in front of you in line at store . . . when people entertain the fanciful idea that the gifts they spend so much thought on won’t be returned at 8 am on December 26.

Yep, it’s Christmas.

And with that thought in mind, we are here to help those shoppers who have sports fans on their holiday lists . . . preferably sports fans with empty spaces on their coffee tables. What follows is a short list of some popular books for that literary-type sports fan whom wants more than what ESPN Sportscenter can offer.

So, here goes . . .

Let’s face it – the New York Yankees are the most recognized sports franchise on the face of the Earth. Even more so than Manchester United of the European Premier Soccer League or even the Collingwood Magpies of the Australian Rules Football League.

So what better way to treat the New York Yankee fan on your list than with The Yankees: An Authorized History of the New York Yankees (© 1999 by Phil Pepe, Taylor Publishing, $24.95). This is the third revised edition, inclusive of the 1999 World Series, and begins all the way back even before Babe Ruth was breaking windows at that school for wayward boys.

But not everyone is a New York Yankees fan – as hard as that may be to believe. For the Boston Red Sox fan (those who have since gotten over the Sox failure in the 1999 playoffs), there is Fenway: A Biography in Words and Pictures (© 1999 by Dan Shaughnessy, $30.00). And since the only stuff to write about the Sox seems to be painful (i.e: the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees and Game 6 of the 1986 World Series), this is a pictorial salute to Fenway Park. Whether or not it is a religious shrine or a pinball machine, historical or hysterical, it is – like the Polo Grounds in New York or the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia – one of the most unique ballparks in professional sports.

And then there is the book by New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica – Summer Of ’98: When Homers Flew, Records Fell, and Baseball Reclaimed America (© 1999 by Mike Lupica, $23.95). Lupica tells the story of the heroic home run chase by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa through a personal viewpoint he shared with his son and while Lupica may be the shortest columnist in America, he is also one of the best. Read this one before you give it away.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is also a fine writer, but has stuck mostly to biographies of dead presidents. But she is also a baseball fan and Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (© 1998 by Doris Kearns Goodwin, $13.00) is her personal and fond remembrance of a childhood growing up as a Brooklyn Dodger fan.

Not so fond are the memories local football fans have of the New York Jets. That’s probably why Gang Green: An Irreverent Look Behind the Scenes at Thirty-Eight (Well Thirty-Seven) Seasons of New York Jets Football Futility (© 1998 by Gerald Eskenazi, $25.00) would be a great choice even if it does have the longest title in the history of literature. Seems the basis for the book is two simple questions - Which was the first American Football League (AFL) franchise to win a Super Bowl? And what is the only team since the 1970 NFL and AFL merger never to win a divisional crown?

Getting away from the painful and the more serene, there is The Longest Silence: A Life In Fishing (© 1999 by Thomas McGuane, $25.00), an assembly of 33 essays written over 30 years which can be passionate, meditative, personal and even funny. McGuane writes, in his title piece, “What is emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences—the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is towards the kinds of fishing that are never productive in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him, finally, a condition of utter, mortuary boredom.”

 

Still serene – but even less so when you consider the angst that follows a missed three-foot birdie putt – there is Blue Fairways: Three Months, Sixty Courses, No Mulligans (© 1999 by Charles Stack, $23.00), a ground-breaking achievement in the essence that a guy like Charles Stack can take a vacation and then write a book about it. Blue Fairways is a pilgrammage that begins in Maine and ends in Florida and takes Stack over 60 public courses from one end of Route 1 to the other (from Pinehurst to a pitch-and-putt in Jersey City).

The story of Blue Fairways is really the story of the people he meets and plays with, the non-golfing lessons he takes from them, and the senses of he experiences from city to suburb to town. Stack writes, “It took sixty golf courses to convince me of a truth about golf and life so obvious and facile sounding, I probably could have gotten it from a fortune cookie or a Salada tea bag: Getting there is nothing; the journey is all.”

 

NOTE: Each week until Christmas, we will try and provide one or two more suggestions for that book lover and sports fan on your list.